Have you been watching the price of oil lately? Probably not. Any thoughts on where it is between its high of $147 in June 2008 and its low since then of $30 in December 2008? Well, let me help: despite the recession, which isn't over yet, the price is now $60.35. Not quite hitting the heights, but heading back relentlessly. And that's before the world economy has managed to lift itself from the floor, where it's been trying to get itself up like a punch-drunk fighter who just took another straight left to the jaw.

The point is, if energy prices are rising like this even while the world is staggering about in a recession, what are they going to be like when - perhaps if - the economy starts to fire on all cylinders again? Although some things are going to be different in the future (there won't be the enormous access to credit that fuelled the past 10 years or so), the one thing you should expect is that energy is going to cost more. That's why it's a good thing that the government announced the feed-in tariff plan: if we don't encourage people to generate their own electricity, they're going to be left in fuel poverty in years to come.

Of course, one element of avoiding fuel poverty is reducing your energy use. And it's on that score that I was fascinated this week to meet Jen-Hsun (pronounced "Jensen", like the sports car) Huang, the president and chief executive of the graphics card company Nvidia. An American of Taiwanese descent, he speaks about as fast as a sports car, and brims with enthusiasm.

The reason: Nvidia is just getting started, in his opinion. Besides the fact that both Apple and Microsoft's next operating system releases (Snow Leopard in September, Windows 7 in October) will be able to use the raw processing power of graphics cards - which far exceeds your computer's CPU - he is also showing off a minimal Nvidia system, the Tegra, which uses a few watts at most. It is destined for mobile devices that will last ages while doing what you want from a mobile device, such as surfing the web and watching video.

Here's the clever bit: if the CPU element isn't needed, it simply switches itself off. The whole system has dynamic power management: relying on Flash memory and the multi-core, minimal instruction-set approach of graphics chips - as opposed to CPUs that rely on being on all the time - means that the power demand can be cut drastically.

You may think the CPU core always needs to be on. Well, that depends on the definition of "always". Machines can work in microsecond slices, and shutting down is among the things they can do in those time slices. It may not seem like stopping for 50 microseconds out of every 500 is worth it, but that's a 10% reduction in power use. Wouldn't you like your computer to last 10% longer, or your energy bill to be 10% lower? That's what is so enticing about Huang's vision: it's tailored both to the future and to what the technology is capable of doing. The meeting of these is always a delight. Sometimes, companies wrench the future to where they want it to be: think of Apple and the iPhone, where the touchscreen became the thing to have only once it was shown off; before that, we prodded smartphones with a stylus or via a physical keyboard.

But sometimes, companies simply move to the place where the world is going to be, and wait for it to arrive. I think Nvidia may have done that with the Tegra. Huang told me Nvidia will have products built around it by the end of next year - palm-sized devices. They'll be worth looking out for as you watch the price of oil - and your electricity bill - start to creep up again.